The invention relates to an aircraft for passenger and/or cargo transport based on a known aircraft design, with a fuselage having a nose section, center section, and tail section, and with airfoils mounted on the center section near the center of gravity of the aircraft and calculated for the required lift, and with horizontal and/or vertical control surfaces located in the vicinity of the tail section to generate stabilizing and steering moments.
Aircraft of the species recited at the outset constitute a standard design and are known as designs of different sizes used for passenger and/or cargo aircraft.
In view of steadily increasing demands for economic operation of such passenger and/or cargo aircraft as well as steadily increasing air traffic, efforts are being made to increase the size of aircraft as far as their carrying capacity is concerned, in other words the number of passengers to be carried or their cargo capacity.
In the past this was achieved primarily by developing new aircraft with ever-larger fuselage dimensions, with correspondingly larger carrying capacity, said aircraft having to be equipped with correspondingly ever larger airfoils to provide the required lift.
In this connection, the recalculation and redesign of the airfoils of an aircraft involve extremely high cost and many years of development.
Another approach to increasing carrying capacity has in the past involved improving a known aircraft design by stretching the fuselage both fore and aft of the center of gravity of the aircraft design that is known and serves as the basis. The larger airfoils required for producing the necessary lift are again recalculated and designed, thus incurring very high costs, since the redesign of airfoils and their calculation involve considerable expense.
Another significant disadvantage of this approach to increasing the carrying capacity of a known aircraft design, in addition to its high cost, consists in the limitations imposed by the design on the possibilities for enlarging the airfoils and lengthening the fuselage aft of the center of gravity, in other words, toward the tail section of the fuselage, since the takeoff angle of the aircraft is reduced as a result, so that such an aircraft would require impossibly long runways.